To date we’ve received suggestions of about 100 tools — free tools — we can use to carry out the digital first, print last transformation of Journal Register. Even with that list we’re still short. In some cases we have a tool in mind — using ShareThis is an obvious choice for content sharing — but we don’t want to overlook another option because we are choosing one we find familiar and/or comfortable.

… The rest of the process of publishing a newspaper is more complicated — at least to me, as I don’t know the tools. I’m not sure all that can be done with free tools but I’ll bet it can all be done in the cloud …

The beauty of this process is that it’s a collective effort to find the right tools. We’re not claiming we have the right ones on our list — which we’ll post in the coming days after another round of feedback — we just want to make sure we do as much as we can to find the right ones.

That said, here are a number of the spots where we are still looking for strong feedback including:

Video editing – Journal Register bought the Flip cameras so the FlipShare software doesn’t make the “free” list. Other ideas?

19 responses to “Video, photo and other tools still needed”

For photos in particular: If you’re just resizing, changing resolution and tweaking a photo a little, a ton of free sites (http://visionwidget.com/toolz/4-design/454-online-photo-editors-websites.html ) handle those jobs quite nicely. And did we mention they’re free? We like Pixlr (http://pixlr.com), but that’s simply because we’re familiar with it. With all of the web services, you can probably finish a tweak in less time than it would take to simply launch Photoshop. If you’re a Mac user, the inexpensive Graphic Converter handles most of the basics for a fraction of the price of Photoshop.

I’d be reluctant about YouTube or any of the other third-party services for streaming, if the goal is to find viable solutions. You don’t want to be so wholly reliant on services hosted by someone else — since those services could shut down or kick you off at any point, for any reason.

I’ve used Picknik to edit photos for my Flickr page. Only basic things like cropping and some color correction are offered with the free package, but it does the job. For video editing, Most Macs come with iMovie for editing. This website talks about some options for free editing software. http://makeinternettv.org/edit/edit-intro.php

As for video streaming, I heard great things about Blip.tv at a conference this weekend. The speaker said one thing he’s noticed is that when it comes to content, enthusiasm for what you do always trumps production values. So that speaks well for the success of the Ben Franklin Project. I have come across another website with a ton of free tools for slideshows, etc. If I find it, I’ll pass it along.

Not sure about a non-third-party video streaming platform, but you can use a tool called ffmpeg to convert your video to a Flash format. Once in a Flash format, there are a number a free video players (as long as your bandwidth can handle it). Looks like these guys have an open source one:

A pretty robust free photo editor is available called Paint.net. It seems to have a wide variety of photo editing tools in the toolbox but the transformation of RGBs to CMYKs using this tool still elludes me.